Latest News

During Hurricane Beryl, power outages can delay the port and infrastructure restarts.

As a result of the slow progress made during the night to restore oil infrastructure, about 1.7 million Texas customers were still without electricity on Wednesday morning.

It made landfall on Monday as a Category 1, or very strong, hurricane near the coastal town Matagorda. This is about 100 miles from Houston. The heavy winds caused damage to property and multiple power lines in Texas.

Reinsurance broker Gallagher Re estimated that U.S. losses would be at least one billion dollars as damage assessments continue. Weather forecasting firm AccuWeather released a preliminary estimate between $28 billion and $32 billion for total economic damage.

CenterPoint Energy is the largest energy provider in the state. It serves 1.4 million customers out of the 1.7 millions without electricity.

CenterPoint reported on Wednesday that it has restored power to over 615,000 customers within the last 24 hour. It also stated that it is confident of restoring 1 million customers affected by the outage.

Customers have asked if CenterPoint had the right number of crews on hand before the storm. After power has been restored, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick stated that an analysis will be done.

CenterPoint's crews had been positioned to be in a safe location when the storm struck. They were then deployed as soon as the landfall location was confirmed on Monday.

Freeport LNG, which is the third largest liquefied gas plant in the U.S.A., has reduced its production since Sunday.

The ports along the Texas Gulf Coast that had closed ahead of Hurricane Harvey reopened with certain restrictions.

Port of Houston will reopen Wednesday after some vessels with similar restrictions were allowed to enter.

Port of Galveston resumed some cruise operations, and cargo operations are expected to resume Wednesday. On Tuesday, some port facilities in Galveston had limited operations due to a lack of electricity.

Port officials in Freeport confirmed that the port was open and operational, but shipping agents reported certain traffic restrictions. Freeport officials said that port facilities were operating on backup power while utility crews worked on restoring power.

Refineries and offshore facilities suffered limited damage, and were largely back to normal operation. (Reporting and editing by Ros Russell in Houston, Arathy Parraga and Marianna Somasekhar)

(source: Reuters)